MagAO Commissioning Day 22: Once upon a midnight dreary…

Edgar Allen Poe—
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…
…Only this, and nothing more:

Kate captured a beautiful shot of Laird pondering the sunset

The excerpt from the poem “The Raven” is brought to you by the Return of the Crow part II.

That is, we put the CRO back on this afternoon, so that we could spend the evening and night making new interaction matrices. We used a new pattern file from Charlie from SciMeasure, and were able to do bins 3, 4, and 5 — the faint modes — as well as testing the chromaticity of the interaction matrices. Tomorrow we will go back on sky to try them out!

We also spent a lot of time making sure we understand our data. We *still* weren’t certain about the orientations of our respective cameras — Jared, Kate, and Laird spent a lot of time disagreeing about which way to rotate the VisAO images to get North up. And T.J., Katie, and Phil spent some time with the Clio FITS headers and with Clio read noise. Our night-lunch sandwiches are wrapped in tinfoil, and T.J. scavenged it to wrap some wires to reduce electrical noise.

Tyson has left and we miss him — Tyson, when will we see that special blog post of yours?

“I’m not interested in discoveries. I just want to take data.” – T.J. (6am after staying up all night)